Meet the woman trying to save California’s DMV

Not all heroes wear capes

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SACRAMENTO, CA – APRIL 12: Marybel Batjer, the secretary of Government Operations Agency and the leader of a strike team appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to reform the DMV, poses for a photograph on April 12, 2019, in Sacramento. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)

SACRAMENTO — She’s been called a “Jedi knight” when it comes to slashing bureaucratic red tape, a benevolent Svengali skilled at breaking down complex government organizations into their most basic parts, the calming eye at the center of political hurricanes.

But Marybel Batjer now has in front of her perhaps the most daunting task she’s faced: reforming the DMV. Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Batjer in January to lead a strike team for an emergency, six-month intervention at the beleaguered agency.

And there’s no shortage of problems to keep her busy. The DMV drew renewed vitriol last year after its botched rollout of the REAL ID, a new form of federal ID required for air travel beginning in Oct. 2020 left customers waiting in field offices for upwards of six hours. DMV employees actually became sick from the stress of working mandatory overtime and Saturday hours to address the long lines.

Computer outages on the department’s outdated network left field offices in the dark.Then, glitches in the department’s new voter registration system signed up noncitizens to vote and bungled the registrations of thousands more. The director of the DMV, Jean Shiomoto, left at the end of the year. A scathing audit released last month described a “reactive culture” among the department’s top management that left the agency woefully unprepared to begin accepting REAL ID applications or to address issues before they grew into serious problems.

But this is Batjer’s wheelhouse.

“I love public policy,” she said during a recent interview inside her corner office in the Jesse Unruh Office Building on Capitol Mall in Sacramento. “And I love even more the ‘How do you make it work better?’ “

It was in that capacity that Governor Jerry Brown appointed Batjer in 2013 as the inaugural secretary of the Government Operations Agency, tasked with making government processes more effective. It’s a position she’ll continue to hold during her six-month sojourn at the DMV. She’s expected to hand the department back in mid-July to either an interim or a new executive director, a post the department is seeking to fill.

Over her career, she has worked for two presidents and five governors, spent time in the casino industry and as an activist for equal rights for women. The Nevada native once described herself as a proud defector from the Republican Party. She’s a former downhill ski racer and the daughter of a Nevada Supreme Court chief justice, who grew up relishing visits from her aunt, Helene Batjer, a foreign service officer for the State Department specializing in Eastern Europe.

It’s a testament to her amicable personality that she’s maintained friendships with colleagues, no matter their ideological leanings, and has been effective working under politicians from both parties, said Sean Walsh, a former aide to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Walsh and Batjer got to know each other in the early 1980s when Batjer, at the age of 25, began working in the Department of Defense under President Ronald Reagan. Later, they both worked for Schwarzenegger during his first year in office.

“It doesn’t matter if she’s serving a Democratic or Republican governor,” Walsh said, “she’s a fixer and a doer.”

She’s also no stranger to agencies in crisis, operating with a “Zen-like” calm despite pressure from the public, local elected leaders and legislators, he said. For example, when local politicians and state legislators were sparring over how to design the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, it was Batjer who brought them all together to agree on a design so the project could move forward, said Patricia Clarey, Schwarzenegger’s former chief of staff.

As the Secretary of the Government Operations Agency, she changed the way the state bids large contracts, so it isn’t locked into rigid, long-term agreements, but can reassess whether the contract is working and make changes at prescribed intervals. She digitized and streamlined civil service exams and modernized the recruitment process so the government can better compete with private companies. And she developed a plan for addressing a major backlog in needed repairs to state office buildings.

It’s not the stuff that makes headlines, said Dana Williamson, the former Cabinet Secretary to Brown, but it is the kind of thing that makes government work better.

“She’s very good at calculating a problem,” she said. “And then she looks outside for better processes and takes other people’s ideas into account and is good at implementing them.”

Don’t expect Batjer’s work at the DMV to result in a series of recommendations for someone else to execute. She’s already begun implementing fixes to problems her team has identified. With only six months, she said, there’s no time to waste.

“We have to simultaneously fix stuff as we see it,” Batjer said.

Batjer plans to have field offices begin accepting credit cards on a pilot basis by this summer and at all field offices by the end of the year. She’s planning pop-up DMV booths at major airports to answer questions about REAL IDs and distribute information on how to apply for one. She already has a REAL ID, she said, but had the luxury of using a semi-hidden office inside the Legislative Office Building near the Capitol to get it.

Batjer is working on outsourcing more of the DMV’s work to private companies, such as AAA, that already handle some DMV functions for its members, she said. And her team is planning an all-day “stand down” for employees in which every DMV office closes for one day of mandatory training — one of the issues singled out in the audit — to ensure employees are provided with uniform information to give to customers.

Redoing the DMV’s IT systems will be a longer process, Batjer said. There are physical servers that need upgrading and proprietary software that needs modernizing. But in the interim, Batjer said work is underway to stabilize the network and prevent future outages or ensure systems come back online quickly during outages.

And before the “summer surge,” an annual uptick in customers, Batjer says there will be a plan in place for how the DMV will manage it.

“So it’s not in crisis like it was last year,” she said.

So far, even the agency’s staunchest critics are cautiously optimistic about what she might accomplish.

“Her appointment was an encouragement to me,” said Assembly member Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, who for the past three years has been calling out the agency’s issues with long wait times, employee absenteeism and IT dysfunction. “I think we have a chance now to turn an embarrassment into an example.”

Five things to know about Marybel Batjer

She has an impressive collective of eye glasses.

She worked under Colin Powell in her Department of Defense days and considers him both a mentor and a close friend.

On a lark, she once ran for AC Transit’s Board of Directors and won the endorsement of every local newspaper but was narrowly defeated.